“You’ll be fine,” Alisa said, patting his shoulder. “I’m confident that you’ll recover.”
“Back up,” Mica said, running out of engineering with the hand tractor. Fortunately, she did not say anything about delusions.
The light level in the cargo hold dropped as the ramp folded up and the hatch shut. Yumi and Abelardus pushed the bikes to the side as Mica aimed her tool at Leonidas. A beam enveloped and lifted him. Alisa bounced from foot to foot, feeling useless as Mica directed his still form up the stairs. Alisa squeezed past him on the walkway and ran ahead to open the hatch to sickbay. Mica deposited Leonidas on the exam table, which creaked under the weight of cyborg and armor.
Alejandro raced in, pointing a remote control at Leonidas. Soft snaps sounded as the armor fasteners loosened. Alisa noticed her fingers trembled as she worked the ones for his helmet the rest of the way free and removed it. His eyelids did not so much as flicker. Was he breathing? She couldn’t tell. She dropped the helmet and rested her fingers on his throat as Alejandro dug into his medical kit for more sophisticated equipment.
“He has a pulse,” she blurted, relief nearly dropping her to her knees.
“Good,” Alejandro said, bringing a monitor over and attaching it to Leonidas’s temple. “Get the rest of his armor off him.”
Alisa usually bristled at being ordered around, but she did not object now. She needed something to do, a way to help. As she worked on the rest of the fasteners, Yumi peered through the hatchway, concern in her dark eyes as she gazed at Leonidas’s still form. Mica stood in the corner, fiddling with her tool. She probably needed something to do too.
“Where’s Abelardus?” Alisa asked as she removed Leonidas’s boots.
“Still in the cargo hold,” Yumi said. “I think he was seeing if he recognized the Starseer.”
It was selfish of her to think of her own mission right now, but Alisa hoped that the man might be roused for questioning. If he was one of the people who had attacked the outpost, maybe he knew where Jelena had been taken. And he could explain why his group, whoever they were, had attacked a bunch of children.
Alisa growled as she dropped the second boot to the floor.
“Can I do anything?” Mica asked quietly, none of her usual sarcasm or flippancy in her voice.
“Yes, two things, please,” Alisa said. “First, take my netdisc.” She dug into her pocket and tossed it to Mica. “Download the ship’s footage onto it and bring it back. I want to see what in the hells happened.” She looked at Alejandro, knowing he would have answers, but he was busy preparing an auto injector while frowning at the readout on the monitor.
“Got it,” Mica said. “Second?”
“Will you pay the fee and see if you can tie into the city sys-net? If we can get satellite access, we should be able to track Beck down by his comm unit inside of his helmet.” After the last time he had gone missing, Alisa had made sure to tie him into the ship’s computers. The Nomad did not have the fanciest tracking capabilities, hence the need for a sys-net tie-in, but if he was still in the city, they should be able to locate him. Or at least locate the position of his armor.
Alisa scowled, imagining someone stripping him out of his gear, the same way she was stripping Leonidas. Except with more force, because whoever had him wouldn’t have his key.
She gave herself a mental kick and pushed the image away. They didn’t know that anyone had Beck yet. He could have simply believed his meeting with the chef’s people was too important for distractions and turned off his comm.
“Anything else?” Mica asked as she headed for the hatchway.
“Isn’t that enough?” Alisa removed the last piece of Leonidas’s armor that she could manage while he was lying there—they would have to turn him on his side to get the rest off.
“I’m an engineer. I’m used to captains giving me at least three tasks to work on at once.”
“Just get me that camera feed,” Alisa said, not in the mood to make jokes.
Yumi followed Mica out to help her, or to stay out of the way in the small sickbay room.
Alejandro pursed his lips as he shoved up Leonidas’s T-shirt and attached a second monitor to his chest, over his heart. Alisa wanted to ask a thousand questions, but she stood back and stayed silent, also not wanting to distract him. There were not any visible marks or bruises on Leonidas’s chest, but that worried her instead of reassuring her, again reminding her of those who had died defending their outpost.
“Was it a mental attack?” she asked when Alejandro took a step back, a perplexed expression on his face as he surveyed Leonidas from head to toe.
“Yes. I assume so. I was busy being yanked out of your hiding place by the other one when the fight started.” He glared at her. “They got the staff.”
Alisa had forgotten about the staff. She almost blurted that she didn’t give a damn about it, not when Leonidas’s life was in jeopardy, but she knew how much it and his quest meant to Alejandro. She was relieved he was attending to Leonidas instead of grabbing her by the throat and demanding that she send a team after it. Not that she would know where to start looking.
“We’ll get it back,” she said, more to reassure him than because she thought it was true. She wanted to make sure he did not go into a funk again, not when he had a patient. “Is he just unconscious now, or is something else wrong?”
Alisa laid her hand on Leonidas’s chest. She wanted to stroke his face, to run her fingers through his hair, but felt subdued by Alejandro’s presence. He had never approved of their growing relationship. Which technically wasn’t growing, since Leonidas had pushed her away and tried to withdraw. That didn’t matter now. She would talk to him about it when he was better. They would figure something out.
“He’s unresponsive and has very little brain activity,” Alejandro said. “It’s hard to tell more with this unsophisticated equipment.” He sneered toward the counter.
“What does that mean?” Alisa asked, worried because it sounded worse than being unconscious.
“Coma. I have a monitor that can do a limited brain scan,” he said, waving at the device attached to Leonidas’s head, “but it’s nothing like you would have access to in a high-quality hospital on a core planet.”
“Would a hospital here have the technology you need?”
Alejandro sneered again. “I’ll look up the dome’s facilities in a minute, but they probably throw you out to the dinosaurs here if you’re sick.” Alejandro tapped a button on the chest monitor, and a holodisplay full of live statistics popped up. “I’ll go over everything more carefully shortly, but at first glance, he looks fine from the neck down.”
“There’s something you should know,” Alisa said, noticing that her fingers had found their way to Leonidas’s head despite her feeling self-conscious with Alejandro there. She was stroking his hair. It was still damp with sweat from whatever battle he’d had with the Starseers. If they had arrived a few minutes earlier, maybe they could have helped. Abelardus might have known how to better fight those people.
“Yes?” Alejandro did not comment on her position.
“There were dead Starseers in the outpost we found. At least five of them. None of them had obvious wounds. They were just… dead.”
“So some Starseer has a special brain-damage attack? Wonderful.”
“I’m sorry I didn’t leave more people here to protect the ship. And the staff.” And Leonidas, Alisa added silently, though he was the last person she would have thought needed protecting. Besides, who would she have left? Beck? Would the outcome have been any different if more people had been here?
Alejandro grunted. “You mean you’re sorry he’s injured.”
“Yes, but I also don’t want that staff in the hands of Starseers who can kill people by breaking their brains.”
“Too late.” He gripped the edges of the exam table. “We never should have brought it here. I was a fool to listen to Abelardus. It should have been locked up in a vault on Perun, n
ot roaming the universe in a floating junk pile.”
Alisa ignored the slight to her ship this time. What did insults matter when Leonidas lay in a coma between them?
“Prince Thorian was with them,” she said.
Alejandro’s gaze jerked up, locking onto hers. “What?”
“Leonidas found a Zizblock on the floor in one of the rooms. He was certain it belonged to the prince.”
“A Ziz-what?”
“A toy.” Alisa held her thumb and finger up to denote the size. “Didn’t your kids ever play with Zizblocks?”
“I don’t know. I wasn’t there much when they were growing up.” He dropped his gaze to the monitor display again, but not before she saw regret flash in his eyes.
A few words of condemnation nearly rolled off her tongue, but who was she to judge? How much of Jelena’s life had she missed by flying for the Alliance? Was she any better of a parent than he was? Jonah had always been more of a natural at that, at understanding the baby talk, of staying calm during the tantrums and wheedling, of knowing the right thing to say to encourage good behavior. Alisa had been fortunate to have him on her team. She could enforce discipline and she could be fiercely protective, and she enjoyed spending time with children when they were acting normally, but there had definitely been moments when she’d been relieved to run off to work instead of dealing with the frustrations of parenthood. She regretted that now, feeling guilty that she had missed any of Jelena’s young life, and that she hadn’t always appreciated what she had.
“Damn,” Alejandro whispered.
Alisa pushed away her thoughts. Had he discovered something on the monitors?
“We were so close,” he added. “So close to achieving… what I promised I would achieve.” Alejandro closed his eyes.
“Look, we’re not giving up on anything yet,” Alisa said, surprising herself by experiencing sympathy for him. “Leonidas is going to wake up because he’s much tougher than any puny Starseers. And we’re going to find Beck. And then we’ll find Jelena and the prince. And then we’ll find that staff, so evil Starseers can’t use it to destroy planets or anything else.” She forced herself to smile, though the ambitiousness of that to-do list left her with a sense of bleakness.
Oddly, Alejandro appeared vaguely hopeful. Maybe he was more willing to believe her optimism than Mica was. Or maybe he needed to believe it now for the sake of his sanity.
“He’s dead,” Abelardus said from the hatchway.
“What?” Alisa blurted, touching her fingers to Leonidas’s throat to check his pulse again.
“The Starseer.”
“Oh.” She lowered her hand. “I guess questioning him is out then.”
“I’d say so. Someone broke his neck.”
Alejandro rubbed his face. “They were locked in a death grip at the end. Leonidas was fighting that one, and I was fighting the other one.”
“You were fighting someone?” Abelardus arched an eyebrow.
Alejandro flushed. “I was clubbing him in the head with the staff, desperate to keep him from taking it.”
“And it was working?” Abelardus's other eyebrow rose.
“He was older than I am. And Leonidas had already hurtled him into the bulkhead a few times.”
“I’d like to see what happened,” Alisa said, reaching for the comm to see if Mica had found her footage yet. She could imagine the Starseers being conscious of the cameras and finding a way to destroy them. They were good at keeping their identities hidden. That thought spurred another one, and she paused before hitting the button. “Did you check to see if he had an ID chip embedded, Abelardus? Or is there a Starseer database that we could run his face through? Check for a match?”
“I took a picture to send to Lady Naidoo.”
“Isn’t she blind?” Alisa asked, not impressed with the idea of that old woman serving as their database.
“She has aides. I don’t have the access privileges to do what you’re asking.”
“Because your people don’t trust you?” Mica asked, brushing past him and into sickbay. She tossed Alisa her netdisc.
“They trust me to fly Darts and brew beer,” Abelardus said.
“Brew beer?” Mica grunted. “Is that your job there?”
“My job is leading a squadron of defensive fighter ships,” he said, “not unlike the job your captain held while in the military. But we don’t always need to fly.”
“And then you brew beer? Captain, I think our highly esteemed Starseer guide just admitted to being a lackey among his people.”
“Even if I wasn’t a brilliant pilot, being a brewer would be considered a noble position. I’m very popular among my people.”
“You mean your beer is,” Mica said.
Alisa ignored them and ordered her netdisc to display the video footage. The feeds from four cameras popped into the air above the device. She resisted the urge to jump straight to the fight, instead commanding the playback to start a few minutes before Alejandro had commed her. One of the internal cameras showed him muttering to himself in sickbay while he performed an inventory. Or maybe he just enjoyed touching his equipment when he was alone.
The rear external camera showed a figure clad in a black robe and carrying a staff walking up to the closed cargo hatch. As usual, the man—it sounded like both of the people involved in the theft had been male—wore a hood pulled low to hide his features. He rapped on the hatch with his staff. Inside, Alejandro’s head jerked up. He ran to NavCom, looked at the cameras, and spotted the figure. From there, he spoke into his comm unit, presumably calling Beck and Alisa. The Starseer rapped on the door again, then bowed his head. Alejandro staggered against the pilot’s seat, lifting a hand to his temple.
“You were attacked?” Alisa looked at him. He was also watching the video playback. She would have preferred it if he continued to help Leonidas, even knowing there might not be anything that could be done. She stroked his hair again, wishing the touch of someone who cared might wake him.
“It was a forceful command,” Alejandro said as the video continued to play. “It hurt as he spoke into my mind. His voice was very compelling and harsh. He ordered me to bring the staff outside. He already knew about it.”
“You resisted him?” Abelardus's eyebrows were up again. He clearly did not think much of Alejandro’s abilities to confront Starseers.
I don’t think much of his abilities to confront anything, Abelardus spoke into her mind. Except maybe a tube of QuickSkin.
“I got the staff and ran and hid in that cubby in the cargo hold,” Alejandro said, waving as the footage showed him doing just that. “I thought he’d find a way in any second, but it was actually quite a while before the hatch opened of its own volition.”
Alisa skimmed forward on the video. The Starseer outside the hatch stood still for a few minutes more, his hood lowered, then withdrew a netdisc from the folds in his robe. For a surprisingly long time, he poked at the display, standing at an angle so that the camera could not pick it up.
“What’s he doing?” Mica asked. “Checking his stock portfolio?”
“Or playing a game while he waits for the other one?” Alisa suggested. The internal cameras were empty, not showing Alejandro crouching in the dark of the hidden cubby.
“What game is appropriate to play before you barge onto someone’s locked ship and attack everyone?” Mica asked.
A second robed and hooded figure walked up to the Nomad’s hatch, and Alisa did not answer. They conferred briefly before the one who had been waiting waved his staff. The cargo hatch opened.
“Leonidas was probably almost back to the city at this point,” Alisa said, checking the time stamp. “I wonder why this one waited for the second one to come since he could so easily get in. He would have known that there was only one old man inside, right?”
“Most likely,” Abelardus said at the same time as Alejandro snapped, “I’m not old.”
“But surely, a Starseer wouldn’t see you as a threat,
” Alisa said. “Especially if you were hiding in a cubby.”
“I should have brought a tranq gun and an injector full of sedative down to that cubby with me,” Alejandro said. “That was what I was thinking while I was sitting in there, hoping the man would go away. But I was afraid to come out. He was—it wasn’t pleasant when he touched my mind. He was even worse than Abelardus.”
“Thanks,” Abelardus said dryly.
“You don’t hurt people when you talk into their minds.”
Abelardus's brow wrinkled. “I don’t know why anyone would do that. It’s certainly not part of telepathy training for our young students.” He glanced at Alisa. “Though, of course, we learn ways to defend ourselves.”
“He wasn’t defending anything,” Alejandro growled.
On the video, the Starseers walked through the now-open hatch. They strode straight to the hidden cubby. So much for delaying them by hiding. Alejandro might have done better if he’d stayed in sickbay surrounded by drugs and injectors. But he probably would not have been able to do anything against Starseers, regardless.
Especially not these Starseers, Abelardus spoke into her mind.
What do you mean? Have you figured out who they are?
I’m starting to get some premonitions, but I’ll need to hear back from Lady Naidoo. I thought—I’d always heard—that this sect had died out decades ago.
What sect? Alisa asked.
Abelardus did not answer. His gaze was riveted to the video. One of the men waved his staff, and the door to the cubby was torn from its hinges and flung across the cargo hold.
“Great, something else I’ll have to fix,” Mica said.
One of the men peered into the dark space. The camera did not show the inside of it, but it wasn’t hard to tell what was happening. The Starseer handed his staff to his buddy and leaned inside. His body jerked, as if he’d been kicked, and then he flung a hand up. Alisa imagined Alejandro being physically punished for his insolence. The Starseer pulled, and a bare leg in a sandal came out slowly, Alejandro’s brown robe rucked up around his waist.
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